Ballet Scene:

Tapping Into Your Potential

By Joshua Bartlett

How tap training benefits ballet dancers

Tap and ballet. They’ve been the bread and butter of most American dance studios since the post-Depression years. Today studios offer a variety of other dance forms like lyrical, modern, hip-hop, and body conditioning courses like Pilates. But the combination of tap and ballet as a basic dance curriculum has produced a steady crop of dancers for each generation.

So if these two very different dance forms have provided the backbone of American dance training, how do they relate in terms of exchanging technical and artistic benefits to dancers? More specifically, how does studying tap help ballet dancers become better ballet dancers?

The most obvious answer lies in the way that tap dancers develop keen musical ears through the application of complicated rhythms. Vicki McLean, the academy director and ballet mistress for the Lone Star Ballet in Amarillo, TX, has always stressed the tap curriculum for that studio. “The main thing about tap is that it benefits all dancers, not just ballet dancers, because of the rhythm of the music,” says McLean. “One of the ways that I teach is that if you can clap out the rhythm of the step, you can do it either with a tap shoe or ballet shoe. I don’t care if it’s Giselle or 42nd Street, you have to get the rhythm of the music.”

Graham Lustig, artistic director of American Repertory Ballet in Princeton, NJ, began tap and ballet training at a small studio in West London at a young age and continued tapping until he was 14. “There is something definitive about making sounds with your feet,” says Lustig, who trained at The Royal Ballet School and joined Dutch National Ballet at age 18. “In ballet there is a little room for leaning forward or backward on a waltz beat or a note. That isn’t the case with tap—you’re either on the beat or not. It teaches you a musical discipline which you can transfer to ballet.”

McLean compares tap dancers to the drummers in bands. “The drummer holds the band together with the rhythm. Rhythm holds ballet dancers to what they are supposed to do,” she says. For example, a dance phrase might include an elongated movement, followed by two quick beats, followed by an elongated movement. “Ballet dancers have to learn to listen,” she adds. “I had a wonderful tap teacher who did all the classics in his tap shoes. He would add rhythmical movements and sounds to Swan Lake. All of a sudden you would hear a different tonal quality. I carried that with me through many years of study.”

Another advantage to studying tap emerges in the speed that both tap and ballet require. “I think tap helps tremendously with ballet, particularly with the allegro, the quick movement, the quick change of weight,” says Fred Knecht, who founded Knecht Dance Academy with his wife in Levittown, PA, 49 years ago.

Joseph Fritz, the deputy dance director at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, began tap classes at age 8, before he started ballet training. “Because of tap, I was always good at petit allegro combinations and moving from one side to the other side.”

Tapping also augments coordination of movement. “All tapping is done on the ball of the foot,” says Fritz. “You never have your heel down except when you stomp. Being on your toes enables you to move quickly from one spot to another. It’s like watching the best boxers—they’re always on their toes, not back on their heels. It enables you to move quicker and have better coordination.”

The weight change required of tapping can aid dancers in understanding the off-balance movement required in Balanchine ballets and other contemporary and neoclassical choreography. “In tap the weight changes are sophisticated, fine, and very fast,” says Lustig. “You work different parts of the foot. When you scuff and slide, you take the center of gravity off the regular center of ballet.”

At Denise’s Dance Connection, run by Denise Ronco in Rochester, NY , all students are required to study ballet and tap before they can take hip-hop. “The more knowledge you have of different dance forms, the better equipped you are to handle a dance career,” says Ronco. “In this day and age, you need to be a well-rounded dancer.”

McLean agrees that versatility offers an advantage. “They used to talk about a triple threat. Now you have to be a multiple threat,” says McLean, who danced in ballet and jazz companies and had a recurring acting role on the soap opera Days of Our Lives. “Ninety-nine percent of my students who are really good ballet students are also good tappers.”

Some ballets include tap in their choreography. The most famous, Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo, features an extended tap solo for the Champion Roper when he tries to impress the Cowgirl. (Knecht remembers that when Rodeo was first danced in 1942, the tap dancing didn’t impress all balletomanes. “People thought it was horrible that they were going to have tap dancing in a ballet. They frowned on it,” he says.) When New Jersey Ballet mounted a production of Rodeo, Fritz danced the Champion Roper because so few of the company men knew even rudimentary tap steps. Now, he points out, half of the dancers at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet started with tap.

In George Balanchine’s Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, excerpted from the musical On Your Toes, the lead male is a hoofer who falls in love with a dance-hall girl. Jerome Robbins referenced tap steps in his wartime sailor ballet, Fancy Free. Twyla Tharp directly used tap in Eight Jelly Rolls and slyly threw in tap moves in ballets like Baker’s Dozen and Nine Sinatra Songs. And in Frederick Ashton’s La Fille Mal Gardée, the Widow Simone does a wooden clog dance that requires some of tap’s rhythmic virtuosity.

Every big ballet company requires character dancing from its performers in ballets like Swan Lake and Don Quixote. Anyone who has sat through lame national dances in the third act of Swan Lake can tell which dancers have had only ballet training. “Tap helped me with my character and folk dancing, because of the rhythmic work with the feet,” says Lustig. “It also taught me how to stay grounded.” When the Metropolitan Opera staged a production of Carmen, the flamenco choreographer Maria Benítez chose Fritz as a soloist because he quickly picked up the complicated rhythms necessary for flamenco footwork.

Learning tap is invaluable for ballet dancers who decide to audition for Broadway shows or other theatrical dancing. One of Knecht’s star students, Nadine Isenegger, has served as the understudy to Cassie in the current Broadway production of A Chorus Line (she has performed the role about 40 times) and was cast as the ingénue, Peggy Sawyer, in the tap dance spectacular 42nd Street.

Dance students sometimes forget that ballet is a theatrical art form, something that is always evident in tap dancing. Most young ballet students, fixated on learning positions and vocabulary, tend not to relax into movement and make it spontaneous. “This is the critical difference with tap—you completely let go and surrender,” says Lustig, who introduced tap into ARB ’s Princeton Ballet School curriculum when he took the reins in 1999. “That’s not what you are thinking when you are 7 years old, learning your first glissade or jeté. With tap there is all this fun stuff you can do. You are usually dancing to a completely different type of music and letting your hair down. It’s a buoyant, optimistic experience, as opposed to doing a ballet solo when you are young, [where] the challenges can take away from the sheer joy of doing it.”

The evolution and histories of ballet and tap couldn’t be more different, particularly in terms of class distinction, although both were invented as a means of entertainment. The roots of tap dancing came from Irish solo step dance, African dance forms, and the English clog dance. Among black American slaves, buck-and-wing dancing became popular, which made its way into 19th-century minstrel shows and showboat performances. The soft shoes eventually gave way to metal-plated soles in the 20th century, and more sophisticated forms of tap appeared in vaudeville reviews, Broadway shows, and on the silver screen.

Ballet, on the other hand, began in 1661 when Louis XIV formed the Académie Royale de Danse. Designed specifically for the royal courtiers, the dance technique included many ballet steps and positions recognizable today (including turned-out positions). The opera ballet soon developed, and the art and technique of ballet blossomed through the 18th and 19th centuries.

Of course, the sheer polar opposition of ballet and tap appealed to Americans, who created new art forms by combining existing ones. The cross-pollination of ballet and tap, along with other dance forms, has produced a uniquely American hybridization. A good example of the breeding of tap and ballet is the oddity called toetapping— dancing on pointe with taps attached to the platform of the shoe. Harriet Hoctor, a 1930s Broadway vaudevillian, created a sensation by toe-tapping up and down escalators and tapping out the meter to Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven.”

So what about the reverse of the original question: How does ballet benefit tap dancers? Some teachers think it helps tremendously, while others are not entirely sold. Linda Lavender Ford, the director of Linda Lavender School of Dance in Monroe, LA, thinks that ballet training is an essential element in tap dancing. “Ballet is the basis for everything. I really think that if you can’t do ballet, you can’t do tap,” says Ford, who loves the elegance of old-style tap dancers like Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell. “You have to have that body placement and center and control. Once you have seen a ballet-trained dancer and one who isn’t, the difference is obvious. The ballet port de bras is necessary for good tap dancing.”

Fritz disagrees. “It’s a totally different ball game,” he says. “If you have studied ballet all your life, you might struggle to pick up the tap steps.” That opinion probably rings most true among dancers who have been rigidly trained in ballet.

Lustig sees reasoning to both sides of the argument. He remembers that as a child it took him a full year to learn not to turn out while tap dancing. However, because ballet requires slower work and deep analytical thinking, he feels that it can help tap dancers understand where the movement is coming from, like the placement of the arms from deep inside the back. “Pirouettes and steps like chassé en tournant, you can translate into tap,” he says. “It also helps dancers to understand the principle of spotting pirouettes and a sense of control.”

In this era, when dancers are required to do just about everything—look at the popularity of the TV show So You Think You Can Dance—the more you know, the more you can better your career. Tap and ballet may be very different creatures, but certainly knowing tap technique can help a ballet dancer become a more dynamic performer.   

Photo captions (from top to bottom):

Fred Knecht sees positive results when ballet dancers study tap. “I think tap helps tremendously with ballet, particularly with the allegro, the quick movement, the quick change of weight,” he says. Photo courtesy Knecht Dance Academy.

 Linda Lavender Ford believes that ballet is essential for tap dancers. Here, Gretchen Jones of Ford’s Twin City Ballet Company in Just a Prayer for New Orleans at Ballet Under the Stars. Photo by Rusty Lavender

Linda Lavender Ford believes that ballet is essential for tap dancers. Here, her dancers perform Tangos at a school Christmas show. Photo by Rusty Lavender  

Graham Lustig, who directs American Repertory Ballet (pictured here are company dancers Joe Bunn and Kristin Scott), says that tap teaches dancers a musical discipline that transfers to ballet. Photo by Eduardo Patino

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